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Bit Rate - And why it doesn't apply to you (pg. 4)
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| cronodevir |
| quote: | Originally posted by Subtle
And FLAC etc. but the wast majority of music these days are played as mp3, because hardly anyone is able to tell the difference. |
Yes, but isn't it mp3 because artist like the people in this thread say "thats the standard so that is what i use"? Artists make the standard you know. |
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| palm |
| artists doesnt make any standard no. if u start releaseing your music as flac only ur ed. i still stand by the statement to keep your final render at 44,1 16bit wav so its easy for labels to make it mp3 without problems with dither and other . |
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| cronodevir |
| If everyone only released FLAC companies would be forced to make their players support FLAC. |
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| Subtle |
| quote: | Originally posted by cronodevir
If everyone only released FLAC companies would be forced to make their players support FLAC. |
Great idea! |
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| DigiNut |
Being a little pedantic here, but "bit rate" is a bandwidth measurement in bits per second (or more typically kbps) and is generally a combination of the bit depth and sampling rate.
What you're really referring to here is bit depth, which is bits per sample, or the word size used to express amplitude of the signal. I've seen some replies using the correct term but thought I should mention this for the sake of everyone else.
I've probably used the former term myself, carelessly, but since this entire thread is about bit depth, it's a pretty important distinction.
Anyway: Bit depth does affect dynamic range, sort of. More bits per sample gives you more discrete values for amplitude. But this is on the digital signal, and you've forgotten (or just oversimplified and omitted the fact) that digital audio signals have to be interpolated into analog signals before any sound can be produced. It's in that interpolation where bit depth makes the difference; interpolation inherently creates noise, which you can hear very clearly at 8 bits or lower. Higher bit depth equals more accurate interpolation, which means less noise.
The reason why your conclusion is still essentially correct, in spite of some fairly sloppy reasoning, is that interpolation noise is already inaudible at 16 bits. Not by coincidence, but because the industry standardized on it specifically because it was sufficient to eliminate any audible noise (same with the 44.1 kHz sampling rate).
For that reason, you generally want your final master to be 16/44. You gain next to nothing by going higher and potentially create problems when compressing or mastering onto physical media. |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by cronodevir
If everyone only released FLAC companies would be forced to make their players support FLAC. |
Even if every artist on the planet unanimously and immediately decided to do all future recordings only in OGG, FLAC, or some other obscure format, a stunt which would be next to impossible to coordinate, the only tangible result would be for consumers to stop buying their music. People already have huge collections of MP3s and equipment to match. Do you think that anybody wants to go out and buy a new player just to get FLAC support?
MP3 is the standard because MP3 is the standard. Maybe this sounds like a tautology, but it actually isn't. The reason that no other format has overtaken MP3 is that no other format actually offers any compelling reason to go through the effort of converting and adapting.
The quality is nearly identical to a 192 kbps MP3, and for all intents and purposes, totally identical to a 256 kbps or better MP3. The file size of these formats tends to be at least double that of an MP3. The best software encoders and players for MP3 are free. The MP3 format itself is completely open and in the public domain. There are a few screwy patent issues but nothing to write home about. And aside from a few oddities with the ID3 tagging system, the MP3 format itself is pretty easy for developers to understand.
There is virtually nothing that FLAC has to offer that MP3 doesn't already have. It doesn't matter that it's technically lossless while MP3 is technically lossy; like JPEG, if nobody can tell the difference then any alternative format that requires more effort to work with and results in larger file sizes is inferior, plain and simple.
People started getting on board with Blu-Ray because, if you've got an HDTV, and almost everybody does now, you can see a major difference in picture quality. People still don't give a about SA-CD because even on the highest fidelity audio equipment, they can't hear any difference in the sound quality. Human hearing itself is sort of low-fi, at least compared to vision. For the most part, the current state-of-the-art already exceeds our biological limits.
You can convert your library to OGG if you want, and I won't look down on you for it, but it's like desktop Linux - you need to accept that it's a niche market at best and will never be accepted in the mainstream because it just isn't useful enough. |
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| cronodevir |
The internet is able to run because of Linux. And Apache. Without those two there wouldn't be any internet.
I think you give Linux a lot less than it deserves. Same with .ogg. Also .ogg isn't obscure, any popular player that does mp3 does .ogg My 40 dollar samsung generi3 player plays .ogg. And I'm sure ipod and other high end equipment supports .ogg
Hardware support isn't even an issue with .ogg, the only reason its not the most popular is because no one knows about it. As is the nature of open source. Same with Linux. It may not be the majority on consumer pcs..but who gives a ? 95% of the internet uses Apache and Linux type systems. Plenty of organizations also use it, such as the Us government, and many other governments around the world.
When it comes to running any type of network, Linux is the only option. And its increasingly easy to use Linux desktop these days. Once people get tired of this Microsoft drm crap, and Linux gets popular, Linux will eventually be the major desktop. In a year or two I won't even have any need for windows in any aspect of my music production. And everything I use will be free. And most games are wine compatible 6-8 months after they are released.
Blu-Ray got popular because Hollywood seen it as a better way to copy protect their stuff. Of course copy-protection is futile. But none the less that is why its the dominate format, it had nothing to do with what people bought or wanted. |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by cronodevir
The internet is able to run because of Linux. And Apache. Without those two there wouldn't be any internet. |
Correction, the internet started on various other flavours of UNIX, not Linux. And anyway, who gives a ? The 1.5 billion home and corporate internet users aren't running web servers, they're running web browsers and word processors and MSN messenger and don't want to have to with a million settings and .conf files just to get their work done.
| quote: | | When it comes to running any type of network, Linux is the only option. And its increasingly easy to use Linux desktop these days. Once people get tired of this Microsoft drm crap, and Linux gets popular, Linux will eventually be the major desktop. In a year or two I won't even have any need for windows in any aspect of my music production. And everything I use will be free. And most games are wine compatible 6-8 months after they are released. |
Hi, I'm Earth. Have we met?
Roughly, oh, 100% of the world's corporate networks are based around Active Directory (Windows), so Linux definitely isn't the "only" option, or even a seriously viable one. As for your DRM whining, I've not met one single person who even notices it, much less cares.
| quote: | | Blu-Ray got popular because Hollywood seen it as a better way to copy protect their stuff. |
Yes, you keep telling yourself that. It doesn't quite explain how they got anybody to buy it, though. Wait, let me guess: "Marketing", your hand-waving catch-all answer for everything you don't understand.
You see, this is exactly why I used Linux as an analogy. You've demonstrated my point with perfect precision. Of course there are a few people who have good reasons for using an obscure technology, but the majority of evangelists are people who:
a) Don't understand how the market actually works;
b) Have no clue how normal people interact with technology;
c) Spend the majority of their time in a bubble, tinkering with their favourite product(s) and talking to others in the same boat;
d) Possess a deeply biased and often outdated understanding of the industry standards, primarily due to point (c); and
e) Automatically assume that any resistance must be due to ignorance, and could not possibly be the result of objective analysis.
It's like this with Linux, it's like this with OpenOffice, it's like this with FLAC, and it's like this with pretty much every other "free" software on the fringe.
I've said all I'm going to say on this subject. There is no way in hell I'm getting drawn into another interminable FOSS argument with a freetard on a production forum. You go ahead and rant about DRM; I'm going to continue living here in the real world. |
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| mzvirbulis |
| more bits the better mate! Sorry to say but just because it has a limited dynamic range doesnt mean to say that you need less bits to quantify a waveform. hi freq suffer because they are usually lower in level. |
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| echosystm |
| quote: | Originally posted by cronodevir
When it comes to running any type of network, Linux is the only option.
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I think you'll find that Linux is only really popular in ISPs and web hosts. The general business environment is dominated by Microsoft servers. Likewise, a lot of the Linux servers you see in such environments are very specialised proprietary ($) Linux distros, which are not comparable to your typical flavour of the month release on DistroWatch.
| quote: | Originally posted by cronodevir
Linux will eventually be the major desktop.
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You sound like you are new to Linux. |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by mzvirbulis
more bits the better mate! Sorry to say but just because it has a limited dynamic range doesnt mean to say that you need less bits to quantify a waveform. hi freq suffer because they are usually lower in level. |
Bit depth has nothing to do with high frequencies. Frequency range is determined by the sampling rate, and 44 kHz is already more than enough to reproduce the entire range of human hearing.
You really should read the previous posts. I hate it when people read the title and maybe the first post, then chime in with some one-liner and ignore everything else that's been said so far. More bits are not better because you may actually end up with distortion if the signal ends up being down-converted without dithering, as it eventually will be. |
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| palm |
| this thread is now about linux |
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